


Black Dog, or Elegy for an Idiot

by aderyn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Grief/Mourning, Post-Reichenbach, angst & hope, lots of references to THoB
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-22
Updated: 2012-01-22
Packaged: 2017-10-29 22:22:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/324804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Sherlock deserves an elegy, a procession of mourners to install him (the friend, the  beloved) as the genius of the place. Because Sherlock was, in more ways than one, the genius of this place. So, screw it, then: London mourns.”</p>
<p>“Finally, for the first time since he died,  Sherlock appears, sitting next to John’s  bed in a dark suit, reading a book with birds on the cover, looking like a shiny-eyed crow himself with his head cocked to one side.  “Idiot,” he says fondly, for old times' sake.”</p>
<p>“This is how John bars the door against the black dog: He shuts his eyes and he puts out his hands.”</p>
<p>We all mourn in our own way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Black Dog, or Elegy for an Idiot

**Author's Note:**

> The "black dog" is in various incarnations a metaphor for depression--popularized by Winston Churchill, but it goes back a lot farther than that: “The combination of ‘blackness’ with the negative connotations of ‘dog’, noun and verb, seems an eminently apt description of depression…Further, the ‘dark hound’ is an archetypal object of fear, with a long tradition in folklore and myth.”—Paul Foley
> 
> There's a sort of anti-elegy return-to-life reunion companion for this story.: [Negative](http://archiveofourown.org/works/361401)
> 
> [ Beautiful art by Alessia Pelonzi](http://alessiapelonzi.tumblr.com/post/59152378714), a gift from [Professorfangirl.](http://professorfangirl.tumblr.com/post/59151547869/finally-for-the-first-time-since-he-died.) Thank you so much.
> 
> New cover art (7/11/15) by [Hamstermoon](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4312554/chapters/9776757?show_comments=true&view_full_work=false#comment_34086246)!

_“The black dog I hope always to resist, and in time to drive_ , _though_ _I am deprived of almost all those that used to help me..._ _Night comes at last, and some hours of restlessness and confusion bring me again to a day of solitude. What shall exclude the black dog from a habitation like this_?”—Samuel Johnson

 

At first, Sherlock is just gone.

John doesn’t dream of him, but rather of disembodied shades, a pale sky and red slashes and disbelief and gravity.  John starts up and claps his hand over his mouth. He's good at that, stifling screams. He’s had plenty of practice.

Non-existent beasts are by nature elusive, but of course John knows they’re there.

In the dark, in his new permanently temporary flat, he thinks about what it would be like if it were him, falling. He doesn’t think it would be so terrible.

***

Grief grafts its own angle onto everything: the furniture, the light,the axis of the earth. The skull and the violin and most of all John’s private Sherlock-signifiers (about which he tells no-one) are infused with an absent presence so potent that he can’t bear to look at them. Mrs. Hudson decides to clear nothing out just yet.

***

Mrs. Hudson’s hands slide over a flat-bottomed flask, a beaker, a test-tube.  Her fingers tweak the buttons on the cuffs of her dress. She says she’s angry, but the truth is she forgave Sherlock all of his trespasses pretty much at the moment he committed them (thumbs and bombs and yes, even this.)  She doesn’t cry at all until she finds a mug she knows is John’s, and then she puts her face right down in her hands.

***

The Public does not leave lilies. A dull percentage of the Public vilifies Sherlock in locker rooms and at dinner tables and around water coolers. A smaller, more luminous percentage leaves hats (you know what kind)  and buttons and notes and not a few candles, low-flamed and flickering, outside the door of 221B, until there’s quite a shrine right there on the step.

***

Molly holds her secret knowledge close. (a carefully-wrapped gift, solemn ,unlabeled.)   _You do count_ , Sherlock said. It shouldn’t be true that words from some people are so powerful-- talismans, really--that they’ll keep _you_ true no matter how you long to veer off course.  But words from certain people are just that powerful, and Molly keeps them close.

***

A very few of the number of the Met (not Anderson, not Donovan) stand over their first murder victim since Sherlock’s death and bow their heads: A moment of silence for the freak, the weirdo, the consulting detective.

***

In his nest at the Diogenes Club , Mycroft fills all of his moments of silence (of which there are many) with images and words he can share with no-one.  He settles on a motto from his club's namesake: "Other dogs bite their enemies; I bite my friends to save them."*

***

Lestrade, heavy-eyed and sheepish, comes by to see John with old crime scene photos and soup. The soup is vegetable; the crime scene photos (a cold case that he’s long held close) show an unusual case of strangulation.  If he can’t decide whether John needs respite or action, it must be because John doesn’t know either.  

“You're eating, right? “Lestrade says.

“Why wouldn't I be?” John asks.

“How long are going to let the black dog walk over you, then?” Lestrade asks.

Lestrade looks at least twelve years older by now, but John can't ask him how he is.  The black dog is all his.

*******

John could go stark, barking mad and no-one would notice.  He's a high-functioning emotional wreck. (Later, melancholic. Goddamn Freud: he’s passed over into the crushed state of melancholia. Freud is utterly full of shit, but occasionally he gets one right.)  He doesn't cry. Well, mostly he doesn’t.  Ella says it's because he hasn't yet accepted Sherlock in his "current form,” whatever that means, but he thinks that’s rubbish. Ah, fuck Freud and while we're at it Jung and Kübler- Ross too.  If he had Sherlock’s gift for deletion he might go back and undo and never have met Sherlock at all: one less killshot, one less meeting of hands. (Or many fewer of those).  But some things aren’t meant to be undone, and therefore, denial.

His ego needs a new object:   _Freud, you wanker, there will never be another object like Sherlock._

Three cheers for magical thinking.

*******

The news comes to The Woman stealthily, as most things do. She doesn’t doubt Sherlock for a second.  She’s seen him as naked as he’s seen her.  She doesn't shed a tear, but it's cold where she is and she turns up her hood and lights a candle on her dressing table and wonders if Sherlock, as she does, has more than one life.

***

In Grimpen Village, the innkeeper and his cook read the news while leaning over the bar one night when their few guests are asleep and the wind is howling over the moor and the spirit of the hound is tied up close by.

“He was a strange man,” Gary, the innkeeper, says, tapping Sherlock’s picture in a guest’s London paper.

“Those two were in mad love,” Billy, the cook, says, pulling himself a pint.

 “That Watson bloke might’ve been straight as an arrow,” Gary says.

“I didn’t say they were _shagging,”_ Billy says, “I said they were in love.”

“Is there a difference?”

“Not for you,” Billy says, kissing his nose. He's been forgiven his indiscretions with quantities of meat.

They drink a toast to their guests even though the tourist business is buggered.  It doesn’t seem to matter whether Sherlock Holmes was a fraud or not. The moor has absorbed him into its mythology.

***

Henry Knight, sprung from his personal hell, thinks of the night he and Sherlock saw exactly the same thing.   _Mates are mates_ , he thinks. _Poor John._  He wonders if he ought to fetch a torch and walk out to Dewer’s Hollow, just because he can.  Sherlock was monster-slayer, no matter what the papers say.

***  
Three of John’s toenails are bruised black from walking the city, stiff-legged, re-visiting their old haunts, re-tracing their footsteps.

It isn’t romantic, walking the streets, but he does it because sometimes, when he’s tired, Sherlock will speak to him.

_It’s regression to the norm_ , Sherlock is saying. _If you lose track of home, then you’re really lost._

_But your norm is still…like another planet_ , John thinks.

_Yes,_ Sherlock says, and he sounds a bit lost.

_There are breadcrumbs and footprints and eloquent dust_ , John thinks.   _Just tell me where you’ve gone and I’ll come right after._

_I have a new base_ , says Sherlock, _and it’s not a where at all._

***

London mourns.  Or no, it doesn't; that's the most pathetic of pathetic fallacies, but John thinks it ought to. The dust of the plane trees should sift down, the hawthorn petals spiral down, the elms and the alders and the rare bird cherry weep, the ravens at the Tower and the ducks in Regent’s Park and the pigeons on Baker Street tuck their heads in the rain.

Buildings that were once car parks and car parks that were once buildings and alleyways and Tube stops and roundabouts and pubs: The whole city is a crime scene. The whole city is a goddamn memorial space.

Sherlock deserves an elegy, a procession of mourners to installhim (the friend, the beloved) as the genius of the place. Because Sherlock was, in more ways than one, the genius of this place. So, screw it, then: London mourns.

*******

“What do you want John,” Ella says, “for the next part of your life?” There’s sympathy in there somewhere, but that’s not her job. 

The thing is, John has never been all that in touch with his desires. It makes it easier to be of service, not knowing what you want. But now he wants something very badly indeed.

“We’re all haunted by things we don’t say,” Ella says. She’s trying to disarm him, but it just won’t work.

He sits in her office while Sherlock shoots the wall, and his hands take the gun away again and again.

_We disarmed one another_ , John thinks, _and neither of us was easy to disarm_.

There’s no room in his culture for his grief. One can mourn a spouse for a year, a child perhaps for longer. But what people can’t define they don’t make a bed for.

***  
Sarah sends John home from the clinic one day with a 40-degree temperature. His eyeballs feel fiery and toothpicked: Macabre hors d’oeuvres served in hell, or from their own microwave at Baker Street, a lifetime ago. In bed in his terrible new flat, trembling and muttering to himself, John dreams of faerie hounds with red-tipped ears, and the lost country into which people sometimes tumbled in the stories he heard as a child. It might not be so terrible, to lose time like that, or never to return.  Stolen children haunt his eyelids. The Brain Llwyd, the hooded crows he once saw in the countryside, flutter ,careless, around his head-- and  finally, for the first time since he died, Sherlock appears, sitting next to John’s  bed in a dark suit, reading a book with birds on the cover, looking like a shiny-eyed crow himself with his head cocked to one side. 

“Idiot,” he says fondly, for old times’ sake.” John says it back but it nearly breaks his heart.

"Best not," says Sherlock, when he tries to get up.

John doesn’t actually care at this point if he's dead.  It’s always going to be a half-life for him.

“Are you sure?” Sherlock says.

“No,” John mutters, “Do you know me at all?”

Sherlock grips his hand, or it seems like he does, and John almost feels an explosion of joy.

*******

This is how John bars the door against the black dog:  He shuts his eyes and he puts out his hands.

There’s no mind palace in there, more like a mind-moor. (Bleak, but beautiful, a gorgeous blank slate.)

There’s a decimated London in there, empty and white and promising and pure. Everything’s vacant except the Baker Street to which he has returned. There’s Baker Street and there’s his future self, shaggy-haired and barefoot, climbing down the seventeen steps to the street, the bell having rung in the quiet flat. There’s Sherlock, who seems to have forgotten his key.  John claps a hand over his future self’s mouth.

“Of course you do,”says Sherlock, “Now may I come in?”

 

**Author's Note:**

> *Diogenes,Greek philosopher and founder of Cynic--from the Greek "dog-like"--philosophy.


End file.
